The Freedom of the Pen

Fortnightly Review, 1 October 1917, pages 539-551, 6,263 words

A Conversation with George Moore.

George Moore, speaking from the depths of a large, soft, red plush chair pulled up in front of his fire, had been drawing upon his rich store of artistic memories for anecdotes, and allowing his fancy to play among his theories concerning music, writing, and brush work.

"The genius of every great nation expresses itself in one of the arts, and we come to think of the chosen art as belonging to it especially — a sort of freehold,” he remarked. “The genius of the Italian Renaissance went into the plastic arts — for Dante is an exception; the genius of Germany is manifest in her music; while that of England finds its most perfect expression in poetry.”

"Then you place English prose far below English poetry?” I interrupted; and Mr. Moore answered: “I suppose one is obliged to concede an extra bay leaf to poetry, but I’m not sure that English nineteenth-century prose as written by Landor and Pater is inferior to any English poetry. Of course, prose is as different from poetry as a man is from a woman; but the qualities that we find in Landor seem to be those that we find in Pater, and he is, for the present, almost as unknown as are the Himalayas, but some day some explorer will scale these summits, and then people will be asking each other: ‘Why did we ever place Shakespeare above Landor; what is Shakespeare that Landor is not?’”

"But I have heard you fulminate against the English novel, so I gather you do not think that English prose has flown with an equal current in all its channels,” I said. “Prose narrative,” Mr. Moore replied, “is the weakest part of English literature. The narrative in the eighteenth century (when it may be said to have begun) was always looked upon as inferior to the prose essay. The writer of stories was not expected to write about the whole of life or to put much cerebration into his work; he was expected to supply entertainment for the drawing-room. Fielding wrote with more freedom of expression than appears in the nineteenth-century novels, but he did not write out of any depth of intelligence. His object was the same as Miss Braddon’s: to amuse the drawing-room. That he wrote more coarsely was an accident; he was born in the eighteenth century, she was born in the nineteenth. Each wrote according to the literary fashion of the time; fashion and taste changed in some unimportant details but the English novel remains as it was in the beginning — a drawing-room entertainment addressed chiefly to ladies. Men are not expected to put their best thoughts into novels, but into poetry and into essays, and, as man is a creature of habit, the novel remains — well, as I have said, the weakest part of English literature. The ambition of the English story-teller of the eighteenth century was to amuse the drawing-room, and I do not think the ambition of any story-teller since has been different. But the literary ambitions of Landor, De Quincey, Carlvle, and Ruskin were nobler ambitions. This cannot be denied. Pater’s ambition was also a nobler ambition, and Stevenson’s in the beginning. No more beautiful books exist than Stevenson’s before he turned to fiction.”

“You think, then, that Stevenson fell involuntarily into the fatal conventions of the English novel?”

“Yes, I suppose he did,” Mr. Moore answered. “Stevenson was an accomplished man of letters and a poet, but without talent for tale-telling. The moment the tale appears, the real Stevenson vanishes. The English genius never found expression in the tale as in the drama, the poem, and the essay. Sterne wrote the most beautiful English prose, but he wrote very little. Balzac and Turgenieff, however different they may have been, had in common the gift of the tale, but I cannot think of any English writer whose gift was prose narrative. It is difficult, however, to say whether the absence of the gift of tale-telling in the English writer may be attributed to something in the English character, or if bitter circumstance tore the gift away from the genius of England. My first story, A Modern Lover, was published in three volumes at thirty-one shillings and sixpence. That was the only form in which the English story was issued to the public, and the form as well as the price allowed the libraries to dictate what might and what might not be written. That very innocent little book was refused by the libraries — Smith took twenty-five, Mudie took fifty copies; the book was a commercial failure, and if I had not been able to look to the Irish peasant for support rather than to literature, I should have had to write conventional novels; but having the Irish peasant under my feet. I determined to break with the library, A Mummer's Wife was issued at six shillings, and a few years afterwards there were tombstones over the three-volume novels. But the popularity of the six-shilling novel did not set English narrative free; at most it struck off a fetter or two. Another enemy rose up, the concomitant of the library — the Vigilance Society.

“As I said just now, the genius of every great nation goes into a single art. Well, it might be as true to say that the folly of every great nation is expressed in some one absurd belief to which, in spite of all reason, it obstinately clings. It would puzzle me to define the folly most characteristic of France, of Italy, of Russia, but not of Germany, and I have no difficulty in defining the special folly of the Anglo-Saxon race — it is the belief that morality is dependent upon literature. It would be difficult to discover in the whole history of mankind a more absurd dogma; we can only compare it to the belief of the old woman that if she spat into the sea she would bring about an inundation. Certain disasters belong to certain centuries. The plagues of the Middle Ages are unknown to-day, and this strange belief that the moral conduct of a nation depends upon the last novel printed was not known to the Anglo-Saxon race in Elizabethan times. The Elizabethans contrived to get on very well without it. The race did not begin to decline with Chaucer; Shakespeare did not destroy the race by his Venus and Adonis, and the thousand coarse passages to be found in his plays. England did not begin to suspect the power that literature possessed of breaking up family ties until the dour religion of the Puritans corrupted her mind, and the germs of the disease, of course, crossed to America in the Mayflower. Here at home, after Puritanism seemed dead, the germ lingered in some remote corner and retained its malignancy. It infected Jeremy Collier, who wrote a pamphlet pointing out the shocking effects that would result if writers continued to produce comedies in which the husband was laughed at. Congreve answered Jeremy Collier somewhat ineffectually that if vice was laughed at in the play, virtue was exalted in the concluding lines. Jeremy Collier’s protests faded out of the public mind; it was not ripe for this extraordinary belief, comparable to that of the old lady, and literature pursued its course. Richardson, Smollett, and Sterne wrote as they pleased, and so did Byron. But the lurking epidemic broke out of holes and corners and raged violently in the nineteenth century, striking down nearly the whole population on both sides of the Atlantic. Acts were brought in by Lord Campbell forbidding the sale of obscene literature under severe penalties; his intention was not to proceed against literature, but against pornography, but these Acts have been misapplied because of this obsession that morality depends on literature, and directed against literature — if not against great literature, at all events against literature. Zola’s novels are not great literature, but they are not pornography; and Henry Vizetelly, a man of letters, the author of several valuable historical works, and the publisher of Zola’s novels in England, was put in prison. He was seventy-three years of age, and he died of the effects of prison life, and two years afterwards Zola came to London and was acclaimed as a literary hero. I suppose nobody will defend such conduct as this. The best members of the Vigilance Society of that time felt sorely about it, for it placed them very much in the light of murderers; this I heard from the late William T. Stead, who began to feel at the end of his life very badly indeed regarding these prosecutions, and I have it from himself that when excited by its successes the Vigilance Society wished to proceed against Madame Bovary, Mr. Stead wrote and said that if that prosecution was not dropped instantly he would resign from the Society. Mr. Stead pointed out that this novel was literature, and that it was not the intention of the Society to proceed against established reputations. Now, it seems to me that Mr. Stead was wrong in taking up this attitude, and placed the Society to which he belonged in a false position; for if licentious (I use the word in its literal sense) stories debase the moral currency, they must be suppressed. It matters not when they were written nor how well they are written; if they be written by Shakespeare they must be suppressed if harmful to the health of the nation, because life is more important than literature.”

"That sounds unanswerable,” I said; to which Mr. Moore rejoined, "Do you think so? Do you not see that it proves people who suppress the latest novel but do not proceed against the publishers of Shakespeare to be hypocrites, since Shakespeare contains passages coarser than any written by a modern?”

"These vigilance societies are more powerful and active than in Mr. Stead’s day, both here and in America,” I suggested, “and no literary man of standing has ventured to attack them. Suppose you develop your views and let me give them to the public.”

After brooding a moment Mr. Moore straightened up in his chair, fire shot from his eyes, the muser was transformed into the fighter, and he snapped: "The Germans are filling the world with din about the freedom of the seas and we are clamouring for the freedom of small nations and the rights of oppressed nationalities, and is it not worth while to strike a blow, however hopeless the cause, for the freedom of the mind? English prose narrative lies prostrate before a contemptible foe.” The new St. George couched his lance and rode down upon the dragon without loss of time.

"Let it be first understood,” he said, “that my plea is not for licentiousness in literature, but for liberalism in literature; and if there be a limit to licentiousness, there must also be a limit to intolerance. No Frenchman, no German, no Russian, no Italian, and no Chinaman considers that unless Literature be hamstrung, every man’s wife will run away with every other wife’s husband; and if the Anglo-Saxon race be right about this, all the rest of the world is wrong.

“These societies are composed of three sorts of people: foolish dupes who think to attain the salvation of the world by providing money to prosecute the latest novel; persons who are inspired by the desire to persecute; blackmailers who start these societies and live upon the folly of their neighbours, together with their secretaries and clerks, whose jobs depend upon keeping up the campaign against publishers and authors so that the dupes will keep on sending in subscriptions. Writers and publishers have hitherto suffered silently, with the humility of Christian martyrs, but it is time somebody told the truth about these people and their propaganda.”

“Hold on a bit,” I protested. “Some of the crusaders are the best of people, who act from the highest motives, who believe themselves to be doing their religious and moral duty in prosecuting books.”

“‘Religious and moral duty’ — ‘highest motives’ — ‘all God-fearing persons agree’ — ‘no right-thinking man denies’ — how many tortures, floggings, burnings have not been ordered by men who mouthed these phrases?” snorted Mr Moore. “Perhaps most are sincere in this, as the old Inquisitors were sincere, that while they are lacking in love for material or moral beauty, or charity, or goodness, they possess what is at best a negative form of virtue, a certain hatred of evil. There is a great deal of good in the world; there are many good books, and it is better to love what is good in books than to hate what is evil in them. Jesus said, ‘ It is better to love goodness than to hate evil.’”

Mr. Moore had begun this text with the confident assurance of a man who is scoring a decided point, but while he uttered the last three or four words his voice dropped to an inconclusive and dissatisfied murmur, and this led me to ask, “Where does that passage occur?” Mr. Moore was crestfallen as he answered, “You mustn't quote that; it is from The Brook Kerith. I had forgotten.” There was a pause, and then he brightened up. “After all, Jesus must have said it many times; He could not have avoided saying it; it is one of those thousands of sayings which had been forgotten and lost when the Gospels came to be compiled. Those Disciples were stupid men.... If I — But we mustn’t digress in this way.”

Thoroughly aroused, Mr. Moore had been striding up and down the room, but now he sat down and said in a calmer tone, “After all, we must not be too hard on them. I know well that very many crusaders are upborne by a conviction that they are safeguarding society, and I do not desire to overstate my case. But the evil which they do cannot well be overstated. English literature is living in a reign of terror under which publishers and writers go about in fear for their reputations, their livelihood, and even their liberties. Only the other day an American publisher whose qualms and fears recently prevented him from printing a book of my own wrote me complaining of the activity of the New York Vigilance Society, and I answered him that publishers should combine, and if they were resolute they could very easily obtain verdicts in their favour; but each time an individual publisher yields he stores up more trouble for himself and others, the societies get more subscriptions; for each book suppressed two others are attacked. These societies prosecute anybody who publishes a book containing anything that can be made to seem unrespectable before men whose vocation is not literature — a jury of greengrocers and plumbers. They must believe that the use of words in any way broad, any licence of language or ideas, any plain speaking regarding the facts of life, are injurious to the moral health of the community. If this is true, I agree with the societies, the book must be suppressed; but now we come back to the point I made when you suggested writing this conversation, that Shakespeare too must be suppressed if licence be harmful to the race, for life is more important than literature.”

“In every court reformers who prosecute books present the same arguments,” I said, “and they are familiar to everyone. Can you suggest how a book should be defended in order to show the jury the fallacy of the belief that morality depends upon literature, and at the same time expose the inconsistency of the crusaders in not attacking classics as well as new novels?”

The suggestion startled Mr. Moore, who exclaimed, “I’m not a lawyer!” But after chewing his cigar a few moments he said, “Well, I always had a taste for the law, and were I not the only Irishman who cannot make a speech, I might have been a lawyer. I think I understand how such a case should be conducted.” He walked up and down the room a few times, and then began, standing with his back to the fire and addressing a dozen Impressionist portraits on the opposite wall:

“Gentlemen of the jury, certain passages have been read to you from a book which the prosecution declares to be an immoral work, and if the charge can be established to your satisfaction the judge will be obliged to order the destruction of the book and to punish the publisher. The contention of the prosecution is that man’s moral nature and conduct are not only swayed, but may be undone if certain societies do not keep strict watch over the latest publication, though it might seem more natural to believe that man’s moral nature and conduct have come down to us generation after generation from the centuries unaffected by passing prejudices and conventions, as are the commotions in the air, the tides of the sea, and the seismic disturbances under the crust of the earth.

“My first point is that the Acts under which this book is published were not intended by the author of the Acts to apply to literature, but to pornographic publications that are quite distinct from literature. It is not true, as the prosecution implied, that pornography and literature overlap and that the frontiers are indistinct. On the contrary, the frontiers are extremely well defined, so much so that even if all literature was searched through and through it would be difficult to find a book that a man of letters could not instantly place in one category or in the other. The reason of this is that real literature is concerned with description of life and thoughts about life rather than with acts. The very opposite is true in the case of pornographic books. It is true, however, that in real literature a good deal of licence is asked for by the author. He must write about the whole of life and not about part of life, and he must write truth and not lies. I think everybody will agree to concede this point to me, but with it goes the corollary that a book is not to be condemned because it contains a coarse passage. If this be denied, all literature would have to be prosecuted. I also contend that a book cannot be judged by a carefully selected passage. It would be impossible to judge of the literary value of a book by a few passages; how, then, can you judge of the morality of the book by a few passages? I shall have to maintain, in the interests of the case I am defending, that a book cannot be judged by certain passages, and availing myself of the ruling of a great number of learned expositors, who have always held that if portions be read from a letter the opposing counsel is entitled to have the whole letter read to the Court, I shall read to you this book in its entirety, and afterwards I shall meet the charge that these isolated passages upon which this prosecution is based are impermissibly broad by reading you extracts from books which are, by common consent, among the classics of our language.

“I’m very sorry to be obliged to keep you from your homes while my assistants and myself read to you representative selections from all periods of English literature, but this case is of the utmost importance, of far more importance than any trial for murder, involving, as it does, the moral and intellectual vigour of our race. The case which you are asked to try has never been tried before. In the case of Vizetelly every effort was made on both occasions, and was made successfully, to induce him to plead guilty. He was told that the jury selected were small tradesmen who could not understand literary questions and would surely convict him. But I'm not of the opinion that small tradesmen cannot try a case of this kind if one condition be complied with: that the case be laid before the jury in its entirety. We cannot get any kind of fair verdicts if shreds of cases are laid before juries, and that is what the prosecution proposes to do — to judge the book by extracts. My intention is to get the whole of the case before the Court, and I can only do this by reading the book to you from cover to cover, and reading to you passages from authors of established reputations, authors with whom everybody is sup|)osed to be acquainted. If your finding be that my client has exceeded the licence that has been tacitly granted by common consent to English literature, you will be bound to condemn his book to be destroyed and himself to be punished for having issued it. If, on the contrary, you find that he has not written with more licence than the authors of the Bible or Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan poets and dramatists, the Restoration dramatists, Sterne. Fielding, Smollett, Ihchardson, Byron, Shelley, Swinburne — the list of names I have pronounced is by no means exhausted, I merely state those that rose up in my mind at the moment of speaking — you will be obliged to acquit him. It cannot be maintained that there is anything in the book I am defending that exceeds the freedom of speech of certain passages which I shall read from Shakespeare and from other great writers. After reading each passage I shall challenge my learned friend to deny that it is coarser than those of which he complains, and if he cannot do so it seems to me you must acquit my client of the charge of publishing a book that will damage the moral currency, one that is harmful to the health of the race, unless, indeed, it be your opinion that everybody has written immoral books who has availed himself of a licence of speech that would not be permitted in the polite society of — shall we say? — Puddleton-on-Slink. If this be your opinion, then, gentlemen of the jury, as honest men, you will have to bring in a rider advising the Society that is prosecuting this book to prosecute also the publishers of the Bible and Shakes]>eare. If the book before you goes, all that I shall read to you must go too. You see the dilemma in which this prosecution has placed you. A verdict against my client involves a condemnation of the Bible itself.

“And here is another point which, perhaps, has not been considered by the members of the Vigilance Society: that the literature of all the world is to be found in the libraries founded by the State or by Mr. Carnegie. The Bible can be obtained in these libraries; all the Latin and Greek writers are on the shelves in their original texts and some in translations, and can be had for the asking. Chaucer, Suetonius, Rabelais, and Shakespeare unexpurgated — think of it, unexpurgated! — and the Elizabethan poets and dramatists! What dangerous places are our libraries — what horrible snares Mr. Carnegie has set for the feet of our children! Plato and Horace must go, although we compel our children to read them in our schools. All ancient authors contain passages coarser than those complained of in this book; and if mv client’s book be condemned, you are all accessories after the fact, for you pay taxes for the purchase of Calderon, Voltaire, Catullus, and, in our own time, Balzac, Flaubert, Gautier, Hugo, Zola — the works of all of these have been purchased with your money. Out of your pockets came translations of Don Quixote which contain many coarse passages. You shall hear the scene in the inn, gentlemen of the jury; you shall hear it, and you will be able to say then if my client has written anything exceeding it: the horrible servant girl goes to meet the trader (at the moment I have forgotten what trade he practised), but you shall hear the passage. Many are the passages in Goethe and in Heine that exceed the licence of which my client has availed himself in writing this l)ook. You shall hear some stories from Boccaccio, and, if you do not weary, some from Brantôme. A passage or two from Plato may throw some light upon this matter. An ode or two from Horace. But we will not anticipate. Now, gentlemen, listen to some passages from Chronicles….”

“Objection!” I interrupted. "As attorney for the prosecution — or, as you would say, devil’s advocate — I object to the dragging in of other books as immaterial and irrelevant. We are not discussing the Bible or Shakespeare or Don Quixote, but the book in the dock, and you must conduct this case according to the rules of evidence.”

The great black tom-cat of the Ebury Street household had entered during Mr. Moore’s address, and was now sitting in an armchair, gravely, and I thought with some astonishment, listening to the forensic effort of his master. "My Lord,” said Mr. Moore, turning from me to the cat,

"there is no accepted standard as to what should be printed or published; no two men think alike on this subject, and no man thinks the same for any two days together. It is impossible, therefore, to try these cases as you would judge a case of theft. A man takes a pocket-handkerchief that doesn’t belong to him, and everybody is agreed that he shall be punished, but nobody can know what shall be printed or what shall not be printed unless a standard measure can be found. Hitherto the laws under which this case is being tried have been applied capriciously and without regard to any standard but there is a standard by which they ought to be applied, and the standard is English literature. It is a standard based upon the practice of dozens of generations, and shall these twelve men judge my client without a knowledge of the standard? Trials at law can only be judged by precedent, and every book that by common consent has passed into English literature has gone to make up the standard of what is permissible and is a precedent in this case. If, for instance, a really indecent book were prosecuted and the jury should acquit the defendant (the jury might be composed of men without regard for public morality), the book might be sold on a barrow in the streets next day — a shocking miscarriage of justice which could not be allowed. If a book exceeds the licence that has come down to us, it must be stopped, the verdict of the jury must be set aside, the higher courts would have to intervene, and the plea would be that books of this kind can only be judged upon precedent. Now, my lord, I submit that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and that you must permit this book to be judged upon precedent.”

The cat blinked its green eyes, and I agreed that my objection had been overruled. “But, my Lord,” I said, “even if this book does not exceed in licence books written in the past, because a crime was committed in the past with impunity it does not follow the crime should be allowed to-day. We are dealing not with the past, but with the present.”

Mr. Moore seized the opening. “That is what the judge in the Vizetelly case said,”he cried; “but there is no past in literature — it is all present. These books are being published now, people are reading them now; their publishers can be attacked if their authors have been dead for millenniums.”

“Your cross-examination of the Society’s secretary would be amusing,” I suggested. “Of course — thank you — thank you,” said Mr. Moore. “It would be delightful. On direct examination he would have expressed his horror at the passages complained of, and when I took him in hand I should first have him explain why he disapproved of them, lead him to exaggerate their importance, and persuade him to admit that he had never seen their like before. Then I would ask him if he had read the Bible, Shakespeare, and Plato; he would say he had, and I would compel him to listen to passages from Deuteronomy, the Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Symposium. ‘Do not the passages I have read exceed in licence any in the prosecuted book? Don't try to wriggle; answer yes or no.’”

I saw that I was now cast for the role of the secretary, and murmured obediently, “They do.”

"Why, then, do you not prosecute the publishers of these books?”

“They are great literature; their authors wrote better than your client and according to the taste of their time,” was the only answer I could find.

"We are not here to discuss aesthetics, we are here to discuss morals, and I ask you whether you agree that if a book be harmful it must be stopped, no matter how well it is written? If such passages are harmful at all, will they not do more harm when they are well written than when they are badly written? Will a passage written a thousand years ago and read to-day do less harm than an equally coarse passage written yesterday and read to-day? ”

Mr. Moore turned triumphantly to the cat (which had gone to sleep) without waiting his victim’s enforced affirmative. "My Lord,” he said,

"these admissions entail a change in the pleading. The pleading will have to be altered that on aesthetic grounds my client’s book must be condemned, for there is no law whereby a book may be burnt and its publisher punished because a book is not sufficiently well written. It might be well if such a law were in existence, but I submit that no such law is in existence.”

"I think the judge would here take the case from the jury and throw it out of court,” I said. "But if the Society won and suppressed the book in question, I am sure your cross-examination would prey upon the conscience of the secretary and lead to attacks upon the publishers of classics.”

"Let us see where logic will lead the crusaders if they be sincere," said Mr. Moore. "We will suppose them to be prompted by the conviction that all literature containing passages such as abound in the classical writers should be condemned, and that after becoming conscientious objectors against the payment of taxes to support libraries where people can read Boccaccio, they have been fortunate enough to secure juries who agreed with them and condemned all the writers that the world has hitherto been in the habit of regarding with reverence, and at length had finished literature off, leaving only Miss Austen and Mrs. Humphry Ward, even then the task of the reformers would not be completed. They will then have to proceed against all the newspapers that publish stories of the unhappy marriages the Divorce Court dissolves. We must go and buy a book, or borrow it from a library, but the newspaper pursues us and we cannot escape it. I shall be accused of being too prudish in these matters, but I have been shocked by newspapers, never by a book. The suppression of the newspapers would not complete the task of our crusaders. They must proceed against public art galleries, break up nude statues and burn pictures, since they presumably think that to see the Hermes of Praxiteles will make a woman leave her spouse or a young girl elope with her chauffeur, to gaze upon the Aphrodite of Melos will induce infidelity in a husband; and if this be challenged, I nobody can possibly deny that some of the greatest of all paintings that hang unmolested in galleries to which admission is unrestricted depict mythological subjects — the Jupiter and Antiope of Correggio in the Louvre, for example — which could not be described in English literature with the same fidelity without drawing down upon the author immediate prosecution. Yet surely to describe an action in words is one degree further removed from Nature than to portray it, and it would be difficult to make plain to a jury that illicit emotions may be stirred up by a written description of a statue and of a picture, whereas the picture and the statue do not awaken any such thoughts in the beholder. But after the closing of our public galleries of paintings and sculpture much work still remains for our reformers to accomplish; they must go into the theatre, and every skirt must descend to the ankle of its wearer: and then they must go into society — disguised as waiters, perhaps, but they will have to get there — so that they may furnish accounts of the dresses that are worn, of the talk that they overhear, of the glances that are exchanged, of the meats that are eaten and the drinks that are drunk. For we do not go into society for the pleasure of conversation, but for the pleasure of sex, direct or indirect. And in society ladies wear their dresses cut low, and it would be very difficult when these are brought into court to convince a jury that the ladies who ordered them were not influenced by a desire to attract the opposite sex: and surely no book can excite such warm emotions as a lady whose dresses are cut very low. People don’t sit in draughts and catch colds for nothing — they must all be clothed to their ears. But, whether dressed or undressed, a woman’s eyes as she looks across the table at one make a more insidious appeal than a library full of books, so glances must be controlled; drink and meat inflame the passions, they will have to be curtailed. And when all these things are done, there still remains a danger, which I fear the crusaders, however vigilant, will find impossible to remove — I refer to the spring days.”

“You have mentioned that our public libraries contain all modern and classical writers, and yet remain unmolested by the crusaders,” I observed. “I suppose you are aware that these books in their original languages are invariably displayed openly on the shelves, together, perhaps, with bowdlerised English translations, while complete English renderings are kept in locked cases and doled out at the discretion of the librarian to persons thought qualified to read them. If books ought not to be read in English, ought they to be read by persons of superior education, when, as Gibbon remarked in prefacing a Greek footnote on the behaviour of the Empress Theodora, they are ‘veiled in the obscurity of a learned language’?”

“What hypocrites we Anglo-Saxons are!” Mr. Moore cried. “The argument put forward by our crusaders is that licentious literature inflames the passions. If that be so, why should these hooks be lent to educated people and not to the uneducated? Are we to assume, then, that education does away with the passions? I have always understood that it increases them. Sap)pho did not lack education, nor did George Sand.The question we are discussing is beset with prejudices, conventions, subterfuges, and obtusities. You spoke just now of bowdlerised versions, but bowdlerised versions are inacceptable, and will always remain inacceptable, for nobody is agreed as to what should be left out. There is no agreement among the emendators themselves. If they were locked up in different rooms they would produce different versions of Plato, Shakespeare, and the Bible, and be at quarrel the moment they were let out, and the locking up of books in the libraries to be doled out to persons qualified to read them calls up to my mind an amusing scene of a librarian questioning a girl as to her age and the education she has received, and looking into her face trying to determine from the profile as well as from the full face whether she is qualified to read Sterne in an unexpurgated version — he has different expurgations set for different ages; one for fifteen, another for eighteen, another for twenty-one — and putting the same questions to a boy who saunters up while the girl is at the counter. Are boy and girl to be called upon to affirm upon oath that they are not actuated by desire to read spicy passages, but are merely anxious to acquaint themselves with the literature of a certain period? How can the girl or boy take such an oath? 'They do not know why they wish to read these books; motives are complicated things; we are not governed by one motive, but by many. After scrutinising the boy’s face and the girl’s face and asking himself again and again. ‘Is this one qualified?’ the librarian hands Roderick Random to one and the Sentimental Journey to the other, and retires to his desk to become a prey soon after to scruples of conscience. Was there not a look in that girl's eye which should have made it clear to him that she was not a person whose temperament allowed her to read The Sentimental Journey? And the boy? Hours later he wakes up in bed with the cry, ‘I was wrong; he was not qualified: I must get that book back in the morning!’”

John Lloyd Balderston.